September 1st

09-01-1939 Lily Tomlin – Born in Detroit, Michigan. Her parents were Southern Baptists who moved to Detroit from Paducah, Kentucky during the Great Depression. She is an American actress, comedian, writer, and producer. She has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960s when she began a career as a stand-up comedienne and became a featured performer on television’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Her career has spanned television, comedy recordings, Broadway and film. Her first television appearance was on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965. Tomlin met her wife Jane Wagner in March 1971. They were married on December 31, 2013. Her signature role, written by her wife, was a show titled The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. It opened on Broadway in 1985 and Tomlin won the Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Play. The 1995 film The Celluloid Closet was narrated by Tomlin. In December 2014, she was one of five honorees for the annual Kennedy Center Honors. In January 2017, she won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 23rd Screen Actors Guild ceremony.

09-01-1928 – 05-24-2023 George Maharis – Born in Astoria, New York to Greek immigrants. He was an American actor most famous for his TV role in Route 66. He received an Emmy nomination in 1962 for his continuing performance as Buz in the TV series Route 66. Maharis was also in a number of films. He modeled for the July 1973 issue of Playgirl magazine as one of the first celebrities to do so. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Maharis guest-starred in many television series, including Mission Impossible, Fantasy Island, Kojak, McMillan & Wife, Barnaby Jones, Cannon, Night Gallery, and The Bionic Woman, as well as Murder She Wrote in 1990. Maharis also released LPs and singles through Epic Records early in his career. Most of Hollywood knew Maharis was gay and he did little to hide it. He retired as an actor in the early 1990s and has pursued a second career as an impressionist painter. Maharis died at his Beverly Hills home at the age of 94.

09-01-1868 – 01-06-1946 Adolph de Meyer – Born in Paris, France. He was the son of a German Jewish father and a Scottish mother. He was given the title of Baron in 1897 by Frederick Augustus III of Saxony, according to Whitaker’s Peerage (edition dating from 1898 to 1913). In 1893, de Meyer joined the Royal Photographic Society and moved to London in 1895. On July 25, 1899, he married Olga Caracciolo, an Italian noblewoman. It was a marriage of convenience since he was gay and she was a lesbian. Cecil Beaton dubbed him “the Debussy of photography.” He is best known for his celebrity portrait photographs. At the outbreak of WWI, the couple moved to New York City, where he became the photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. In 1922, he became Harper’s Bazaar chief photographer in Paris. In 1938, on the eve of WWII, de Meyer returned to the United States. Most of his prints were destroyed during the war. He died in Los Angeles on the anniversary of his wife’s death (she died January 6, 1930), January 6, 1946.

09-01-1815 – 10-25-1882 Emma Stebbins – Born in New York City, New York. She was an American sculptor. Her best-known work is The Angel of the Waters (1873) located on the Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, New York. She studied in Rome where she lived with sculptor Harriet Hosmer. While in Rome, she fell in love with stage actress, Charlotte Cushman. In 1869, Cushman was treated for breast cancer. Stebbins devoted all her time to nursing Cushman for two years. Following the death of Cushman, Stebbins never produced another sculpture. Stebbins died in New York in 1882. On June 14, 2014, Stebbins was featured in the first gay-themed tour of Green-Wood Cemetery in New York.

09-01-1949 – 11-15-2014 Leslie Feinberg – Born in Kansas City, Missouri. She was an American transgender activist and author. Her first novel, Stone Butch Blues, won the Lambda Literary Award and the 1994 American Library Association Gay & Lesbian Book Award. Feinberg died due to tick-borne infections, including chronic Lyme disease. Feinberg’s widow Minnie Bruce Pratt is a professor at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.

09-01-1976 Babydaddy (Scott Hoffman) – Born in Houston, Texas to a Jewish family, Hoffman lived most of his childhood in Lexington, Kentucky. He is an American musician. Hoffman is also the Ivor Novello Award-winning multi-instrumentalist, backing vocalist and lyricist for the US glam rock band, Scissor Sisters. Hoffman is openly gay. He is the younger brother of comedian Ben Hoffman.